The present disclosure is generally related to image guided medical procedures.
Port-based surgery allows a surgeon, or robotic surgical system, to perform a surgical procedure involving tumor resection in which the residual tumor remaining after is minimized, while also minimizing the trauma to the intact white and grey matter of the brain. In such procedures, trauma may occur, for example, due to contact with the access port, stress to the brain matter, unintentional impact with surgical devices, and/or accidental resection of healthy tissue.
Current technology to generate tractography information of the brain is through the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MM). MM images are typically taken hours before the surgery and require co-registration to a patient's stereotactic head frame. This is a costly approach and requires significant patient preparation. More importantly, these dated images deviate from the actual anatomy of the brain during the surgery due to the brain dynamics and affection of the surgery, which misguide the surgeon and impose potential risk to the surgery. These images are also static which provides no feedback to the surgeon during the surgery. Tractography information could potentially be obtained with intraoperative real-time MM. This requires patient's head to rest inside an MR imaging head coil and fixed within the fixation frame throughout the surgery. The use of MRI introduces significant cost to the operating room (OR) setup. The sophisticated setup delays surgical procedures and extends the surgery.